Low stack height bikes - the bane of my existence!
I can mess around with reach, with the bar/stem length/rise, only so much before a bike designed around someone with really short legs just causes so many problems its no fun at all riding.
Case in point, the latest Marin San
Quentin frame adds 30mm-ish to the stack height. They finally realized. Dartmoor bikes has dropped the stack height on a model i wanted to buy. And then there is a new X-Cobra 587 street frame that none of the suppliers can state what the stack measurement is so i refuse to buy and build up to find it doesn't fit me at all. I already have two frames I'm ditched because of this issue.
6ft 2
Full suspension bike - 490 reach + 40mm stem
Hardtail - 510 reach + 35mm stem
The hardtail is an experiment in longer reach, 140mm fork so the the reach & head angle don’t change too much with sag.
I always look at reach, stack & headangle first. The above figures mean nothing in isolation - e.g I have a 160mm fork on the full suss (designed around 150mm) and this kicks the head angle out by 0.5degree, decreases the reach and increases the stack. Then take into account the 10mm of spacers under the stem, the reach figure is prob sitting closer to 478mm.
There’s about 30mm of spacers under the stem on the hardtail so again that 510mm reach isn’t as long as you think!
@CalamityJames - I think it’s also because I ride hardtails in a different way that I enjoy a slightly shorter reach. I could be wrong as I’ve never tried a super long HT whereas I have ridden plenty of long FS bikes. I really liked the medium Geometron I tried.
